Triangle Lake to Eugene, OR

Via Hwy 36, secondary roads and bike path. 40 miles. We completed our crossing of the Coastal Range today, during another beautiful ride among the green hills of Oregon on another perfect weather day.

We are in Eugene tonight, a town of about 140,000 people in the central valley between the Cascade Mountains to the east and the Coastal Range to the west. It is also the home of the University of Oregon. As you might expect, this is a very bike-friendly place. We rode from the outskirts into downtown on an wide and very well-maintained bike path that allowed us to avoid virtually all of the traffic one would expect to encounter in traversing a city of this size.* We also saw tons of other people on bikes, but virtually all of them were obviously riding from one point to another in town, around the U of O campus, etc. I don't know why that surprised me. Why wouldn't you buzz around town on a bike rather than pay for owning and maintaining a car, when statistics show that the average errand trip distance is only a couple of miles?

We've continued to meet extremely nice people although we have noted that Oregonians tend to be a little different. There seem to be a fair number of "free spirits" living here (ex-hippies, survivalists, people that tape over the slogan on their car's license plates, etc.) For example, a woman we met yesterday in Deadwood (yes, this is not South Dakota), who had a very faraway look in her eyes during the entire conversation, described the 'slippery rock' area of the creek at the Triangle Lake campground as "a little trippy". (What she meant is that you could be seriously injured if you weren't careful and/or had too many beers prior to sliding [in very fast moving water] down and off a rock slab into a churning pool filled with other large rocks.) Another guy we met today at the gas station/C-store in Low Pass (who looked like he had not shaved or bathed for an extended period of time**) worked himself up into a froth about how much of a danger local drivers are to "bikers". When he finally realized that we were not riding motorcycles he stopped instantly, picked up his purchases and left saying only "have a nice day".

*Eugene isn't exactly a major urban center, but it is the largest city we'll traverse on our way back to Colorado.

**Although I had not shaved in at least a week and we had slept in a tent last night, we felt positively fresh by comparison.